October 2017. Curated by Beth Kantrowitz and Kathleen O’Hara of Drive-by Projects in Watertown, Massachusetts, Sanctuary explores definitions of home.

"It unites the creative work of seven artists working in a wide variety of media. Together, the images and objects of these New England-based artists examine the sanctuaries we construct both real and imagined. Is a house a sanctuary? Civilizations throughout history have constructed shelters to protect from the elements, invaders and predators, but at a certain point people craved more than mere refuge from physical discomfort and danger. Social and commercial issues such as privacy, family needs, and status emerged and influenced the types of dwellings that were built and inhabited. As an ideology of “home” has taken shape over time, an elemental question prevails: “When does a house provide the sanctuary of a home, and at what point does it lose its homey status?”

"Works in the exhibition include Emily Hass’s spare, poignant, architecture-based drawings, Kelly Sherman’s Family House floor plans and Kathleen O’Hara’s wall paper/painting installation Peep Show.Fritz Hortsman’s small models taken from the formworks of buildings he has known intimately occupy wall and floor space, along with Linda Nagaoka’s bone white ceramic sculpture of resilient plant forms that emerged from the ruins of the Hiroshima bombing.

Photography in the exhibition includes Remi Thorton’s spooky nighttime photographs of abandoned buildings and Kelly Sherman’s Sofas series of the artist testing sofas in a Crate and Barrel store. Julia Hechtman’s video A Man Out ofTime (For CM) documents a bearded, tattooed man’s experience of REM sleep. The inherent contradiction of this film with its cozy, serene bed and the slightly threatening bad-boy persona of the sleeping man ask the elemental question posed by the exhibition, “when is a home really a sanctuary?”"

PRESS

Newport Mercury October 4, 2017Salve gallery show probes inherent fragility of home by Alexander Castro

“Sometimes homeyness is not lost to the horrific or the spooky but everyday traumas and hurtful truths. Kelly Sherman’s “The Family House” is a series of floor plans that subtly and powerfully narrates the end of a marriage, with colored rectangles marking the parents’ bed and desks. Over the course of four panels, the beds, desks and parents themselves move apart. At the end we can only see the dad’s furniture in the master bedroom, his bed half the size it once was.

Sherman’s work points to one weakness in a home’s foundation: its inhabitants, whose energies make a house a home."